One Hosted Mac or Two: Price Queue Time and Recovery

Published November 11, 2026 • Figment editorial team

The case for a second Mac usually surfaces after a bad week: a build queue that backed up for two hours, or a single host going offline and blocking the team. Both problems are real. Neither automatically justifies doubling the bill. The right answer depends on actual job volume, how CI is configured, and whether recovery has ever been tested, not on a general preference that two is better than one.

This page gives you the math and the acceptance test to decide for your situation, and points you at the Figment plan that matches the answer.

What You Are Actually Buying

Figment offers two options that matter for this decision:

Option	Monthly price	What is included
Single M-series Mac	from $95	One M-series Mac, one CI runner you manage yourself
Managed Mac Team	$999	Two M-series Macs, two CI runners, CI setup, backups, monitoring, one hour of support per month

Two single M-series hosts at the entry price come to $95 × 2 = $190/month. The Managed Mac Team at $999/month adds the CI setup, backups, monitoring and support on top of two machines, so the operational gap is $999 − $190 = $809/month for that management work. Exact chip, RAM and disk for the $95 entry are confirmed in the quote; physical M-series plans currently collect configuration requests until supply is confirmed, so ask Figment to confirm availability and spec before counting on parity between two self-managed hosts.

If you also want Intel for older toolchains, the $29 virtual Intel macOS plan (2 vCPU, 8 GiB RAM, 80 GiB disk, no GPU or audio) runs a real Intel macOS environment on Linux/KVM and can drive Intel-supported Xcode releases. Per Apple, if you need to run Xcode on an Intel processor, use Xcode 26 or earlier. Xcode 27, visionOS work, and ARM-only execution need Apple silicon, so Intel VMs cannot be a drop-in second runner for an Xcode 27 pool.

Queue-Time Worksheet

Measure the queue before you add hardware to it. Fill in your own numbers.

DAILY BUILD VOLUME
  Average builds per day:        B = [______]
  Average minutes per build:     T = [______]
  Total CI minutes needed/day:   U = B x T = [______] minutes

AVAILABLE CAPACITY
  Number of Macs (runners):      M = [1 or 2]
  CI-active hours per day:       H = [e.g., 16 across two time zones]
  Daily capacity (minutes):      C = M x H x 60 = [______] minutes

QUEUE STATUS
  If U <= C: no queue; a second Mac only buys headroom
  If U >  C: daily overflow = U - C = [______] minutes
  Rough average wait per job   = (U - C) / B = [______] minutes

PAYBACK FOR A SECOND MAC
  Wait cost per job  = wait minutes x hourly rate / 60 = $[______]
  Daily waste        = wait cost per job x B           = $[______/day]
  Monthly waste      = daily waste x 22 working days   = $[______/month]

  If monthly waste > $95  -> a second self-managed M-series pays back on queue alone.
  If monthly waste > $904 -> Managed Mac Team pays back vs one bare host.

Worked example, using your own build profile, not these numbers: 40 builds/day at 12 minutes each gives U = 480 min. One Mac active 12 hours gives C = 720 min, so no queue and a second host only buys headroom. Change to 80 builds/day and U becomes 960 min against C = 720 min, so the overflow is 240 min/day and the average wait is 240/80 = 3 min per job. At a $100/hour developer rate, that is 3 × $100 / 60 = $5 per job, $5 × 80 = $400/day, or roughly $400 × 22 = $8,800/month in wait time, well above the $95 upgrade to a second self-managed M-series.

Two Macs Is Not Automatic Failover

A second Mac gives you a fallback runner, not a hot standby. Before treating it as high availability, know what it does not do on its own:

It does not detect that one runner is offline and re-route in-flight jobs; the CI service does that, if configured.
It does not retry failed jobs; retry policy is a CI setting on your side.
It does not clone Xcode versions, signing identities, or tool chains between hosts. Both machines must match to be interchangeable.

The work to make two hosts actually substitutable is:

Both runners registered under the same label or pool in your CI service.
Signing identities and provisioning profiles installed on both machines, with private keys delivered through your secret manager rather than copied around as plaintext files.
A rehearsed procedure that confirms jobs route to the surviving runner when the other is offline.

On the Managed Mac Team plan, Figment handles the CI runner setup, backups and monitoring listed above. Installing your signing identities and configuring your CI service remain your responsibility unless a specific scope is agreed in the quote.

Restore-Test Acceptance Plan

Run this test before relying on the second Mac for recovery.

Pre-test setup:

Both runners registered and completing jobs in your normal CI queue.
Runner labels or pool names documented.
Last successful build on each runner noted.

Procedure:

Step 1: Take Mac 1 offline. Ask Figment to pause it, or stop the runner
        agent cleanly. Do not destroy the host.

Step 2: Submit a representative build through your normal CI trigger
        (a real commit, not a stub job).

Step 3: Record:
          - Seconds from submission to job start on Mac 2
          - Minutes from start to completion
          - Any failure caused by missing tools, identities, or config

Step 4: Bring Mac 1 back online.

Step 5: Submit another job. Confirm both runners pick up work.

Step 6: Fix every gap found in Step 3 before the next maintenance window.

Pass criteria: the job completes on Mac 2 within a threshold you set, with no manual intervention. Any manual step you needed is your recovery runbook, not automatic failover, and should be labelled that way in the docs.

Xcode And macOS Parity Across Two Hosts

For two runners to be interchangeable, both must run matching Xcode and macOS. The exact pairings are published at Apple's Xcode system requirements, and Apple's porting guide tells Intel developers to use Xcode 26 or earlier; Xcode 27 is Apple-silicon-only. Practical consequences for a two-host decision:

A team on Xcode 27 needs two M-series hosts. The Managed Mac Team ships this by definition. For two self-managed hosts, confirm chip family in each quote; a $95 entry does not lock a specific M-series model.
A team still on an Intel-supported Xcode release can pair the $29 Intel VM with another Intel VM or with an M-series host pinned to the same Xcode 26 line, as long as both runners carry the same tools and simulators.
iOS device archives and most simulators work from Xcode 26 on Intel, including universal and arm64 device builds via cross-compilation. visionOS and anything that needs to execute ARM natively still require Apple silicon.

AWS Context For A Two-Runner Budget

If EC2 Mac Dedicated Hosts are on your shortlist, AWS publishes its on-demand per-host-hour rates and a 24-hour minimum allocation on the EC2 Dedicated Hosts pricing page. Using the current US East (N. Virginia) feed values: mac2 (M1) at $0.65/host-hour is $474.50 on a 730-hour normalised month, so two hosts are $949. mac-m4 at $1.23/host-hour is $897.90 per normalised month, so two are $1,795.80. Storage, data transfer and any Savings Plans commitments are separate, and 730 hours is a normalisation, not every actual invoice.

Two-runner budget, same-term comparison:

Figment, two self-managed M-series at entry price: from $190/month, hardware confirmed in the quote.
Figment Managed Mac Team: $999/month, two M-series plus CI setup, backups, monitoring and support.
AWS, two mac2 (M1) on-demand: about $949/month normalised, plus storage and network.
AWS, two mac-m4 on-demand: about $1,796/month normalised, plus storage and network.

Figment's managed team and AWS's two-M1 budget land in similar territory on headline price; what differs is what is in scope. On AWS, the CI runner installation, Xcode parity, signing identity distribution and monitoring are yours to build. The Managed Mac Team includes the CI runner setup and monitoring listed earlier.

Decision Guide

Your situation	Recommendation
Queue math shows no overflow and one host carries the load	One M-series from $95, revisit at twice the build volume
Queue overflow costs more than $95/month in wait time	Add a second self-managed M-series and share a runner pool
Need two hosts but no in-house CI operations time	Managed Mac Team at $999
Team is on Xcode 27 or doing visionOS	Two M-series; confirm chip in the quote
Still on Intel-supported Xcode 26 and cost is the pressure	One or two $29 Intel VMs, upgrade a slot to M-series when Xcode 27 becomes required

Start a quote or ask about availability at /mac-hosting/start. If you are weighing the Managed Mac Team, ask which parts of the restore-test plan above are already covered by the included CI setup and monitoring so the rest can be scoped before you sign.